THE LONG HISTORY OF CONSERVATIVE ATTACKS ON DEMOCRACY, AND WHY THEY KEEP REPEATING THEM.

     I was born in the middle of the last year of the 1940s. By the time I was born, Joseph McCarthy had added one more drunk Republican to the Senate. While he certainly sought power, that was not what he was drunk on. A few years later, 1953, John F Kennedy entered the Senate. One of these men is celebrated, The other was another in the long list of public embarrassments from the Republican party. 

     Throughout my lifetime, Republicans have given a safe hiding place to fascists and proto fascists. Not all Republicans were part of the conspiracy, but they share the thing that should embarrass them all. Yes, I acknowledge that the Democratic party contained at that time the Southern Dixiecrats who spawned the KKK during Reconstruction, but they had been slipping into disfavor since the 1948 Democratic Convention seated its first black delegates. By 1971, the Dixiecrats would be invited, under the aegis of the "southern strategy", into the Republican party. They would go on to join forces with the Dominionist Christians to wall off democracy from the autocratic state they desire, while erasing the wall between church and state. Democracy has suffered since that time. Republicans have never divested themselves since from wall-building.

     Vietnam was shared guilt. If Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had met with Ho Chi Minh at the end of WWII to help him create a Vietnamese nation, and not a French territory, they might have been heroes. He didn't. If JFK had not been assassinated in 1963, he might have found a way to end that war. But that did not happen. By the time I had gained the right to vote (the 18 year-old vote had passed when I was 19) the war was a seemingly unending drain on tax dollars and young men. Nixon said he would end the war when he was elected in 1968. What we did not know at the time was that Nixon had sent Henry Kissinger to Hanoi to plead with them to not sign a treaty with LBJ before the 1968 election had taken place. The war continued until 1975, more young men were killed, more money wasted. We did not find out about that sinister plan until Nixon had resigned from office and been given immunity for all of his other crimes, by his Vice President, Gerald Ford, who succeeded him. No lessons learned there.

     A similar thing happened a few years later when Ronald Reagan was pursuing the presidency. Iran had captured our embassy and its staff, and were holding them hostage. Jimmy Carter, then President was busily trying to find a diplomatic solution. Carter, we must remember was considered by the Dominionist fold, insufficiently Christian. Reagan sent his vice-presidential runningmate, George H W Bush, to Bhagdad to persuade the Ayattollah Khomeini to hold on to his prisoners until after the 1980 election. The embassy staff had already been prisoners for nearly a year. They would remain captive for 444 days before President Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president. The minute he was inaugurated, they were released. No one in the Republican party, not one soulless pig, would proclaim that anything but a victory. This story would not emerge until information on the Iran-Contra affair emerged. Part of the terms of agreement was to release to Iran some old anti-tank missiles owned by Israel, which we would replace with newer equipment. Israel would reimburse us the purchase price from Iran, which would be passed on, quietly, to the Contras who were fighting the Nicarauguan Sandanistas. Reagan had been specifically forbidden by Congress from aiding the rightwing Contras. But, "when you're president you can do anything". Those words were spoken by Nixon, who learned that there was a limit even for Republican president's. Reagan, too learned that there are limits to the presidency but in true Republican fashion, the penalty was not too onerous. Several dozen Reagan functionaries, including Casper Weinberger, secretary of defense, would be indicted. Eleven would be convicted, some charges would be vacated on appeal, the rest would be pardoned in the waning days of George HW Bush' presidency. It should surprise no one that William Barr then in the justice department, would later become Attorney General under Trump as a reward for this legal philandering. Oliver North would become a frequent guest on Foxnews.

     In its efforts to display Republican moral superiority after all of this, Republicans impeached President Bill Clinton for certain sex acts in the Oval Office, sex acts that several Republican legislators were similarly having acts performed for them in congressional offices, but there is a phrase that protects them. The acronym is IOKIYR, it's okay if you're Republican. We would learn several years later that there really is something that's not okay when former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert would go to prison for sexually abusing some of his students on his high school wrestling team. Ken Starr, who was Special Counsel in the Clinton investigation was, after a short period of private practice, given a sinecure job at Baylor University. He later was forced to resign for not following up on sex abuse claims sent to him to investigate. IOKIYR. George W Bush was told about a secret operation by Al Quaida to attack the US.  William Clark claimed to be running around with his hair on fire, but nothing was discovered until Sept. 11, 2001. No worries, no Republican was at fault. It was all Clintons fault for not sending a patriot missile into a suspected Al Quaida encampment with children playing on a swingset.  We allowed the Saudi officials to fly home even though all other flights had been cancelled. 16 of the 19 suspects were Saudi's  but no investigation of suspected links would be carried out. There was much more in the Bush Jr. administration, including the Vice-president shooting a hunting partner in the face, but space does not permit. There might be, in some of you, a suspicion that there is a two-tiered justice system. A smaller few might be tempted to believe that that two-tiered justice system was not available to Democrats. There's more, much more. President Barack Obama was our first African-American president. He won in spite of a bogus claim made by Donald Trump, Foxnews and other Illiterati, that candidate Obama had been born in Kenya, not Hawaii as his mother, the hospital, and anyone else not a Republican, had presented evidence in support of. Some still hang on to that belief. Republicans were angry that they couldn't impeach President Obama  so they swore that they would block Obamacare, which was passed during his first two years, from being funded. They tried and failed over 50 times. Hillary Clinton was President Obama's Secretary of State. She became the next target of the angry house Republicans, now in control of both chambers. They held numerous investigations on Ms. Clinton, the longest lasting some 11 hours of testimony. No reason to press charges could be found. That was not their purpose, as revealed by future Speaker of the House (for five minutes) Kevin McCarthy. He bragged that they had weakened her presidential run. Another trick they had up their sleeve, an FBI investigation led by Director James Comey. This was done conveniently just before the November election, and though no reason was found to convict, the worst Mr. Comey could find was some "carelessness" in handling her emails. Even though he had cleared her, he never-the-less could not resist being a party scold, just weeks before the presidential election. And this has brought us to the presidency of Donald John Trump who has attacked our electoral system, our foreign friends, our justice system, and even inspired an attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. To this point the former president has not spent a day in jail, even though his charges are serious enough that anyone not a Republican would have spent at least some time locked up. Attacks on Democrats continue in the House of Representatives, including the presidents' son, Hunter Biden. One of the humorous revelations from this investigation was his lap-top, which was alleged to have been dropped off at a computer repair shop. This revelation, which has no chain of custody, was exposed by Rudy Guiulani who learned of it through some Ukrainian exile friends with Putin connections. Rudy fell from popularity after Trump was elected. This is no joke, the laptop was received by an employee who was legally blind. But none of that was embarrassing enough to embarrass the party of Trump. So far Trump has been indicted on 91 federal charges in four states. Through legal delays, and judges strategically placed by Trump and the Federalist Society, none of those charges have yet been tried, and if Trump wins election in November, he will be able to outlast the Statute of Limitations, his goal. Yet the Republican party rests comfortably in Trump's tiny hands. 

     In addition to these ongoing events, many of which will be reviewed by the Supreme Court, as well as lesser courts, we find out that the conservative majority have been well and truly embraced by billionaire largesse, should a Justice need some extra cash in exchange for justice from the bench. It's  enough to bring to mind the motto of Judge Roy Bean in the 19th century, "the law west of the Pecos".

     Most recently a federal judge formerly in the Trump justice department has ruled on some Vice-Presidential papers inadvertently remaining in Joe Bidens possession. Trump is scheduled to be tried on much grander scale by a Georgia court for the same thing, but the vaunted speedy trial is not pending. This judge, a Judge Robert Hur, admitted that there is not enough for Biden to be charged for those papers, but he spent nearly 400 pages giving his medical opinion that Biden is an old man with an old man's memory. We must not assume that there was no plan to weaken Biden's Presidential re-election, I suppose.

     Republicans and their foot-soldiers are always telling us to fear the "Deep State". I have worried about a deep state of a different kind for many years, but after the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, I'm inclined to think that the deep state was what saved us from overthrowing a legally elected president. Thank you Mike Pence. And it would surprise no one if we found, deep in the bowels of deep statecraft, a secret cabal of Republican billionaires pushing us in the direction of autocracy. It's okay if you're Republican.